D&D 5E Why Has D&D, and 5e in Particular, Gone Down the Road of Ubiquitous Magic?

[TheLoneRanger1979]

Past a certain point, a low-level monster ceased to be a threat (nothing new/strange there, really). Thus the 'feeling of advancement' PoV. But, no, guidelines aren't 'insistence,' not in any of the editions that've had them, not even when they've worked dependably.

But it isn't so in 5E. Now any lower CR monster/enemy can be a threat if present in sufficient (and still more manageable) numbers. And (at least) i personally feel the rise in power of my PC more by being able to measure that power through metrics like how many of the said critters can i handle as opposed to when i was level x-n.

EDIT: you ninja'd me on 5E

And if you did level them, then you'd constantly feel like you're still being threatened by kobolds, no matter how much more awesome you'd become.

Exactly my thinking!

I think the problem in this example comes from levelling too quickly. You can run an entire campaign against goblins or orcs, while still avoiding this problem (in any edition), as long as you don't gain more than two levels over the course of the entire adventure.

This i never considered before. It does open some new avenues of thought.

 

[Sunseeker]

And if you did level them, then you'd constantly feel like you're still being threatened by kobolds, no matter how much more awesome you'd become.

I think the problem in this example comes from levelling too quickly. You can run an entire campaign against goblins or orcs, while still avoiding this problem (in any edition), as long as you don't gain more than two levels over the course of the entire adventure.

Sure, but you need some incentive to keep going. Gaining *stuff* is still typically why one adventures instead of staying home and tending the farm.

I don't think I could reasonably put a group of players though any game that didn't level at least once a month (8-hour weekly sessions typically) without some kind of substantial rewards other than levels. Magic items are nice, but 5e puts the kibosh on how many you can really carry around and use, what else is there, wealth? Land? Titles? Sure you can carry a game forward with that, but eventually your adventurers aren't adventurers anymore. They're titled nobility with an incentive NOT to go adventuring.

I think it's typically best to fall somewhere between Oblivion's raiding parties of 25th level necromancers and a "natural" world where nothing is a threat anymore. The Kobolds with levels don't see you as a threat when you are low levels. But once you've waded through the blood of their "lesser" brethren they take notice of you. Wolves will shy away from high-level characters, rarely engaging them, but those wolves will alert the dire wolves or other spirit guardians of the forest and those guys aren't afraid to engage you, but may have considered you beneath their notice before.

So it's not just that powerful creatures pop out of the woodwork the higher level you become, it's that they're already there and the party at lower levels makes an effort to avoid them and not gain their ire, while those creatures take little interest in your doings because there's nothing you can do that matters to them. Yet.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But it isn't so in 5E.

No, it is: you still get a feeling of advancement in 5e, it's just slower, less pronounced and mostly around damage/hps. A kobold stays a threat, if, eventually, a largely theoretical/trivial one, but because of Bounded Accuracy, being outnumbered tells so heavily that a big enough group of them is always a threat - there's a point, as there was in the classic game, when resolving that many opponents becomes impractical, but it takes longer before you /need/ that many. In 3e or 4e, you'd eventually present the same monster in larger numbers differently, as a swarm (both) or by stepping it from standard to minion (4e).

And (at least) i personally feel the rise in power of my PC more by being able to measure that power through metrics like how many of the said critters can i handle as opposed to when i was level x-n.

It's just a matter of actually doing that. Revisit a monster at higher level, and you'll notice some advancement - more/faster in 3e & 4e than in 5e, and less evenly-advancing in 3e, but advancement in all three cases. Only face same-level monsters and you won't notice much beyond bigger numbers (attack/defense in 4e, damage/hps in 5e, and both in 3e) on both sides.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

Sure, but you need some incentive to keep going.

That's an issue in any game that doesn't involve levels, though. What keeps a Shadowrunner going, without the specter of gaining a level or magical loot? Or a Raven? Or a samurai?

Or is it only the constant progression feedback which keeps people interested in a D&D campaign?

 

[Tony Vargas]

That's an issue in any game that doesn't involve levels, though. What keeps a Shadowrunner going, without the specter of gaining a level or magical loot?

Specter?
In Shadowrun, money, for one thing (get enough to buy a 'permanent high lifestyle' for instance, or, to keep getting more cyber upgrades, if you're intent on going nuts), and IIRC, there was some sort of exp system, too.

Or is it only the constant progression feedback which keeps people interested in a D&D campaign?

It was a big part of the appeal/incentive, I'm sure. I first noticed the issue when I tried to drum up any interest at all in Traveler, there didn't seem to be a 'reason' (today we might say a 'meta' reason) to play your character, at all - you only got better during the terms you spent in chargen, once you left chargen, whether after one term or mandatory retirement, you could never learn anything again...
Same with gaining magic items: none in Traveler, obviously, and even RuneQuest, another game I tried to get others interested in back in the day, had advancement (more 'realistic' advancement, too), but it didn't have the wild range of magical treasures to find that D&D did.

And, really, there you have another reason for ubiquitous magic: opening new spell levels and acquiring powerful/game-changing magic items is part of the draw.

 

[Stephen D. Patterson]

5E AD&D is a "power gamer" fill-up. Characterization is touted, but it's really optional

 

[Ancalagon]

Also a big factor.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who's had this issue.

Like I said, when looked at from a certain angle, they could appear that way. If you had the world, in essence, leveling up around the PCs, so that when the 1st level part journeyed from Winterhaven to Hammerfast, they randomly encountered kobold bandits on the road, when they'd reached 11th and went from Hammerfast to Winterhaven, they randomly encounter Githyanki on the road, and at 21th level, Titans, for instance - or worse, if they kept encountering Kobolds, just 'higher level' kobolds, (as you could do in 3e by giving them class levels), or when every door turned from wood to iron-bound to adamantine as you leveled.

But that strains credulity. If the road from Winterhaven to Hammerfast is now invested with Titans, the road is now impassable. Or did the peasantry level up too?

Well, that's a definite position in the chicken/egg debate: that high levels worked poorly because no one played them, or was ever meant to have done so. I don't find it terribly persuasive, it still seems like an attempt to put forth playable high-level rules that just failed, so didn't get used much, and led to the cycle of not really trying with higher level rules, either, that lasted until 4e, and is presumably back with 5e (since it's returned to advancement structures comparable to those of past editions that had the problem).

I would be really be curious to hear how the game works out at high level from other players. I don't see much of a way out from the swiss army knife issue.

 

[pemerton]

If you had the world, in essence, leveling up around the PCs, so that when the 1st level part journeyed from Winterhaven to Hammerfast, they randomly encountered kobold bandits on the road, when they'd reached 11th and went from Hammerfast to Winterhaven, they randomly encounter Githyanki on the road, and at 21th level, Titans, for instance - or worse, if they kept encountering Kobolds, just 'higher level' kobolds, (as you could do in 3e by giving them class levels), or when every door turned from wood to iron-bound to adamantine as you leveled.

Yep. And it's that insistence of staying on the power curve that made the whole experience feel so gamey. If you didn't level those Cobolts, no matter the numbers, they just wouldn't feel a threat.

In the context of 4e, the game is not intended to support travelling back and forth between Hammerfast and Winterhaven dealing with encounters on the road.

This is clear from the descriptions of the tiers of play in the PHB and DMG; as well as in the flavour around paragon paths and epic destinies (eg a Knight Commander/Legendary Sovereign, or a Warpriest/Demigod, is not meant to be framed into random encounters on the road). And meeting kobolds on the road at heroic tier, and then titans in the Elemental Chaos as you try and reforge creation during epic tier, isn't really a problem, is it? (And at paragon tier, the PCs should be dispatching whole phalanxes of hobgoblins.)

This "story escalation" that is inherent to the 4e design may or may not be a good thing - some people want the game to stay prosaic, in a certain respect, even as the PCs gain levels - but I think it's a reasonably apparent thing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

But that strains credulity.

Sure, that's part of the issue, really...

If the road from Winterhaven to Hammerfast is now invested with Titans, the road is now impassable. Or did the peasantry level up too?

... but it's the angle you have to squint at the treadmill from to see it that way.

In the context of 4e, the game is not intended to support travelling back and forth between Hammerfast and Winterhaven dealing with encounters on the road.

Not from first through 20th level, certainly, not in the context of any edition, even 5th would 'strain credulity' a bit if you found enough kobolds to get enough exp to get to 20th level just walking back and forth between two towns.
But, if you did happen to drop by your old stomping grounds 10 or 20 levels later... what would you find? If you're able to see the treadmill as a travesty of a mockery of a sham, you probably found a Githyank invasion or 11th level kobolds 10 levels later, and Epic-level Kobolds ("just how many Sons did Kurtulmak father in the Nentir Vale, anyway?") or a clan of Titans trying to bring back a Primordial 20 levels later.

This is clear from the descriptions of the tiers of play in the PHB and DMG; as well as in the flavour around paragon paths and epic destinies (eg a Knight Commander/Legendary Sovereign, or a Warpriest/Demigod, is not meant to be framed into random encounters on the road).

Sure. I mean, unless they're meeting the Buddha on the road or something. But that'd be Fate.

And meeting kobolds on the road at heroic tier, and then titans in the Elemental Chaos as you try and reforge creation during epic tier, isn't really a problem, is it? (And at paragon tier, the PCs should be dispatching whole phalanxes of hobgoblins.)

No, of course not... but if you did happen to decide to go slumming and wipe out a kobold tribe back in the Nentir Vale on your home dimension, you wouldn't expect Titans to have displaced them or the Kobolds to have all gained levels at the same pace you had. Maybe the DM would have you fight 'swarms' of kobolds - the whole tribe at once - to make a playable encounter of it, or maybe he'd just hand-wave it and give you no experience, but the expectation that if you take a break from cruising the Elemental Chaos and beating down uppity Titans, you've come a long way from fighting for you lives against kobolds led by a berserk goblin, and it'll show.

That is, unless you were playing the game a certain way... and if you were playing it that certain way, from that PoV you'd see the 'advancement' of the treadmill as a hollow thing, since you couldn't ever seem to /find/ anything significantly weaker than yourselves. Or, for that matter, to take it from the other direction, anything all that much more powerful than you (a solo a few levels above you, sure, would be much more powerful than any one of you, individually).

This "story escalation" that is inherent to the 4e design may or may not be a good thing - some people want the game to stay prosaic, in a certain respect, even as the PCs gain levels - but I think it's a reasonably apparent thing.

It's implied in levels, really. Back in the olden days, you started out a magician's apprentice or a veteran of one battle, and ended a Feudal Lord in his castle or reclusive Wizard in his tower - and, if you didn't end it there, could go dungeon-crawling in the Abyss and kill Orcus, instead of dungeon-crawling in a dungeon and kill orcs. Once monsters got a clear 1:1 corresponding CR/EL, it was inevitable that someone would fall into the trap of just matching the party against same-level monsters all the time. The futility of that might be masked if you had increasing imbalances within the party as you leveled (though there's some obvious futility in that, too), but when you're all neatly balanced, you can more easily 'see the wires.'

You could keep things 'prosaic' by just ending the campaign sooner. Just play to name level. Just play E6. Just play through Heroic Tier.

 

[Sunseeker]

That's an issue in any game that doesn't involve levels, though. What keeps a Shadowrunner going, without the specter of gaining a level or magical loot? Or a Raven? Or a samurai?

Or is it only the constant progression feedback which keeps people interested in a D&D campaign?

Progression is an easy way to keep people interested and one of D&D's largest systems. You can't cut out one of the largest systems, or reduce it to one of the smallest systems and expect people to look at a game with the same interest. It's like offering someone a hot-rod and then saying they'll only get to drive it at 20mph.

But your wording is more generally phrased and I'm going to have to take advantage of that: levels, few levels or no levels there is STILL progression feedback, in the form of increased wealth acquisition, power, land, status, titles. So yes, a game REQUIRES progression feedback in order to function. If you start out as level 4 mercenaries, with the best thing you could ever possibly become is level 5 mercenaries who do exactly the same things they did before, make just as much money as they did before, never become any more feared, respected or landed than they were before then there is no progression. It's a static image.

Games require progression, that may be vertical progression (levels and personal strength), horizontal progression (kingdoms and castles), or some combination of the two but they are intrinsically required to make a game function, because the alternative is you don't have a game, you have a photograph.

I personally quite enjoy the personal power progression, because I typically make "true" adventurers, people who want nothing more out of life than enjoyment, exploration and the constant danger of ever-larger threats! So yes, for some people power progression feedback is a big deal. I can certainly take it slow within reasonable degree but the knowledge that I will get to continue progressing as long as the game keeps going needs to be there or I'm not interested.